[Techtalk] GPL vs. BSD licenses (was Linux and *BSD )

[Erin Mulder]

I think both licenses are very useful, just for different purposes.

GPL is great for groups of volunteers looking to innovate, to build up 
the software commons, or to create free alternatives that will compete 
with commercial products.  It helps ensure that nobody can embrace and 
extend your software, or otherwise unfairly compete with the original 
project.  People can sell services around it (e.g. convenient 
distribution, support, documentation, etc.), but it's difficult to try 
to sell enhanced versions of the software itself.   One unfortunate 
result is that few corporate developers are able to contribute on paid 
company time.

BSD-style (e.g. Apache) is great for standards and corporate 
collaboration.   Six application server companies might decide that 
instead of each creating their own incompatible security 
implementations, they'd do better to collaborate on one open version and 
each build upon that core in their commercial products.   This is risky 
from each company's standpoint, though...  what if the project goes the 
wrong way, or not everyone does their fair share?   The beauty of a 
BSD-style license is that at any time, you can take a fork of the code 
and go your own way if things don't work out, without having to 
contribute future changes to freeloaders.  You can also integrate it 
tightly with proprietary code without having to expose that private 
codebase to the world.  This makes companies much more willing to 
dedicate developers to open source in the first place.

So why would independent volunteers contribute to BSD-style projects? 
Usually because they want to use the resulting product, or want to help 
others without pursuing any monetary/ideological gain.

Right now, I'm involved in two projects.   One uses a BSD-style license 
and will probably be picked up by lots of different commercial products 
   The other uses GPL and is meant to expand the software commons so 
that government and non-profit orgs don't have to pay over and over 
again for commercial software.

Cheers,
Erin